Rachel Maddow Started Crying While Talking About Infant and Toddler Detention Camps

In a powerful moment on Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow had to pause her MSNBC show as she read aloud breaking news from the Associated Press that the U.S. had separated babies and young children from their parents at the border and sent them to “tender age” shelters.

“This is incredible,” Maddow said of the news when it arrived on her desk. “Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children…to at least three…” and she couldn’t continue beyond that. Maddow handed the segment off to Lawrence O’Donnell, who was live from Brownsville, Texas.

In a thread posted to her Twitter account after the show, Maddow apologized for becoming emotional and continued to relay the news that had gotten her choked up. But Maddow had nothing to apologize for. In these fraught, dire times, the news needs more empathy, not less.

That same day, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski appeared on Fox News and mocked an undocumented 10-year-old girl with Downs syndrome who was separated from her mother at the border. “Womp, womp,” Lewandowski remarked when presented with the story.

It’s a repulsive, abhorrent way to speak about a disabled child and her pain, but it serves a function: the more that this cruelty is normalized, the more dehumanized refugees and undocumented immigrants become in the eyes of the American people. It makes the Trump administration’s aims — to scapegoat the population and carry out atrocities against them, like holding them in detention camps and breaking up their families — that much easier to meet.

We thank Rachel Maddow. We thank her for having a heart, and for reminding us that we can't be numb to what's happening to these vulnerable people. If we are human beings, these ongoing violations of human rights ought to shake us to our core, and prompt us to swift action.

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